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Monthly Archives: October 2015

Turns out that a good mobile app is not complete without these 3 important features:

Friends and family app content content sharing.

Relevant and targeted notifications.

Frictionless in-app purchases.

How do I know? Well, I’ve spent quite a bit of quality time with several good research reports like this one by Google/Ipsos, this one by Localytics, and this one from AppAnnie. To help make it all actionable, I’ve worked with my awesome team to create a small pilot video series entitled “Acquire, Engage & Earn” and a couple of sample projects you can clone from GitHub. As you may have guessed, the three main episodes in the mini-series are devoted to mobile app content sharing, notifications and in-app billing respectively.

Acquire, Engage & Earn

So, here we go, let’s start with user acquisition and mobile app content sharing. In this video, you’ll learn why friends and family recommendations are important, and how to implement them in your app with App Invites from Google (g.co/AppInvites).

Next, let’s talk about user engagement. 1 in 4 of installed apps are never used, and only 26% are used daily [Ipsos]. One way to make sure your app is not one of the unlucky ones is to implement relevant and targeted notifications. You can do this with Google Cloud Messaging, and to get started check out the GCM Playground open source project, and watch the video below.

Last but not least, show me the money. When the user is ready to pay you, make it easy for them by using this code example explained in the last video of my mini-series. Spoiler alert: the video starts with an epic intro which is my acting debut alongside the great Todd Kerpelman. I decided to keep my day job.

And that’s all there’s to it! Next time you build an app, remember to design and implement features that make it easy for your users to share it, engage with it, and pay for it!

PS> If you’re not into watching educational videos, but came here purely for entertainment, watch the aforementioned (epic) intro which we conveniently made available as a standalone series teaser.